Sugarcane Academy by Michael Tisserand
Harcourt 2007
ISBN 0-15-603189-9
184 pages

There are so many stories emerging from the days and months after hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the failure of the levees that they are starting to blend together into one large collection of “disaster lit.�? From experts dictating opinions from afar to those who were on the ground recounting their survival, the great purging of national shock and despair has begun in earnest. All of this is good and necessary — in fact it is likely only in these stories that the larger truths will finally emerge of just how many things went wrong in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. But in the rush of big dramatic stories, smaller ones can often get lost. Michael Tisserand’s Sugarcane Academy is one of those small stories, but his retelling of how a group of parents set out to minimize the trauma on their children and keep them going to school after they left New Orleans is both heartwarming and brilliant. When you have lost your house, it is easy to be overwhelmed and forget what matters, but Tisserand and the people he writes about did not do that — they focused on what was the most important thing for their kids, and subsequently, their families, and in doing so created a truly amazing school.

Tisserand, a writer and editor for Gambit Weekly, along with his pediatrician wife and two young children, evacuated the city to friends in New Iberia right before Katrina hit. Along with everyone else, they thought the move would be temporary and were stunned by the level of devastation they saw unfold before them on the television. Their house, one block from Lusher Elementary School, was not heavily damaged by the flood, but it still soon became apparent that they weren’t going to be returning home anytime soon. As they tried to decide what to do, what any of them could do, the children began to make noises about wanting to go to school. While many communities in Louisiana were reaching out and accepting new students, Tisserand and his friends saw a need to keep the children together if at all possible. It was when he ran into his daughter’s former teacher, Paul Reynaud, that a plan was hatched to teach the kids they found from New Orleans as a group. Reynaud was critical to the ideas’ success, as he was (and is) a unique and dedicated teacher. Interestingly enough, after college he started out working in restaurants:

“During his days and nights in the kitchens of New Orleans, Paul noticed how other workers couldn’t read. They struggled just to decipher one-syllable words and abbreviations written out on orders. He tried to help by doing things like writing H-A-M for ‘hamburger.’ Every day, Paul said, he would encounter intelligent people who could do a lot of great things, but could not read. He also met women who spent their lives assembling salads for dinners. In a way, said Paul, the city of New Orleans was built by people who did such careful work in the kitchen. But he couldn’t stop thinking about what his co-workers might have accomplished with a better education. Looking back, he thought this might have been the time when he decided to stop working in kitchens and go into teaching.�?

Reynaud ended up being an inspired choice to teach the New Orleans children in New Iberia as the parents, all of whom had found each other and kept in touch over quick meals and phone calls in the new town, quickly discovered. They started out with only the children of three families, but were determined to find more. The parents also promised to pay Reynaud a salary culled from the donations they were receiving from family and friends across the nation. The school was quickly dubbed “Sugarcane Academy�? in honor of the nearby sugarcane fields. Getting it going was what mattered most. As Tisserand writes:

Being together counted for a lot that first week of September. We didn’t know who had homes and who didn’t; we didn’t know who still had jobs. But it was September, and school would begin again. Our school.

Tisserand recounts the struggles of the families as they learn about their homes and those they had lost touch with, then balances those passages with the lessons Reynaud taught the children. He had the children maintain hurricane journals, so they could explore their nearly overwhelming feelings about what had happened to them. “For many weeks,�? writes Tisserand, “many of the children believed that the hurricane was still raging in New Orleans. They thought that was why we couldn’t return. We didn’t learn about this belief until later, after they saw the city for themselves.�?

As Sugarcane Academy grew, Reynaud’s lessons shifted and expanded to accommodate the needs of the children. His lecture on Halloween encompassed all manner of myths and legends, including those about the surrounding sugarcane fields. Tisserand asked him about his teaching method after listening to him talk to the children about the holiday, giving the author a peek into the mind of an original thinker and teacher at work.

In recent years, Reynaud said, he’d noticed how schools use coordinators to drop into classrooms to make sure that teachers are keeping lesson plans on track. Teachers must follow a script that sometimes leaves little room for improvisation. “You had this feeling that you were supposed to back off on riffing,�? said Paul. “But if the lesson is going really well, you’d want to let them keep playing.�?

A classroom is shared with the students, he said, and teachers need to listen to students instead of just lecturing to them. “For a teacher, it kind of opens you up to hearing, ‘We’re bored’ or ‘We don’t like this.’ And once you open up that dialogue, it’s hard to shove it back in a box.�?

The main thing he’d learned so far at Sugarcane Academy, he said, was that school didn’t depend on books or on having the right colored marker. “In the first couple weeks, it was just like, ‘Okay, I’m going to talk to you for a little while, and then I want you to write something for me.’ It was really a pure form of teaching.�?

That “pure form of teaching,�? (which will read like a revelation to most parents) kept the children occupied and learning as the adults struggled with what to do next.

By October, Reynaud and most of the Sugarcane parents were ready to return to New Orleans. Tisserand was uncertain as to what path his family would take, but they eventually resolved to go back as well. Most of the city’s schools were not functional, however, so it was decided that Sugarcane Academy would go back with them.

On November 7th, the school reopened on the grounds of Loyola University. The university president himself approved the students using rooms on the campus. “He didn’t ask about insurance,�? writes Tisserand. “He had already heard about Sugarcane Academy. He told Mary that bringing the school to Loyola was the easiest decision he’d had to make since the storm.�?

In New Orleans the school grew, and by the middle of the month about 50 children were enrolled with many new teachers joining the group. The parents collected $50 a week from each family to pay the instructors, and Reynaud took on the role of principal. The teachers all developed their classes as they chose, resulting in some fascinating compilations of general studies that were tailored to the specific needs of Katrina survivors. For example, the older children studied a unit on migration, something required as part of the state curriculum. But along with the Trail of Tears, the California Gold Rush and the Irish Potato Famine, the Sugarcane Academy kids also learned about the Katrina Exodus. “Whatever we were doing needed to be relevant to what was going on in their lives right now, at this moment,�? said teacher Robin Delamatre. “That became our mantra.�?

As many of the teachers and students slowly resettled into new lives in their old neighborhoods (or as close to those neighborhoods as they could get), Tisserand found himself torn between staying and leaving. He continued to follow the education story, though, and picked up pieces of it in the Cajundome in Lafayette, in St. Bernard’s Parish and in Houston. Everywhere he went, he found different ways in which the children who lost everything were struggling to find what they missed the most: that sense of community from family, friends and home. As parents, teachers and administrators did their best to hold it together in so many different places, the author’s belief in the significance of Sugarcane Academy grew stronger. On December 20th, the school held a graduation ceremony as Lusher Elementary and other area public schools were planning to reopen. Sugarcane Academy had been a great success, and now it was time for the children to return to the classrooms they had known so well before the storm and the flood washed so much away.

In an epilogue, Tisserand mentions the struggle that many of the displaced children faced as they tried to fit into area schools and especially how much they needed to be with kids and teachers they knew. He specifically points out Rosie O’Donnell and her work building a community center in Renaissance Village, a FEMA trailer park in Baker, Louisiana. He also mentions the fight students and parents endured to reopen Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science & Technology in the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the community’s “success stories�? that sat vacant until an activist group, Common Ground, cleared out the debris without city permission. The school reopened at another site in September 2006 with plans to return to their building in 2007.

As for Tisserand, he and his family left New Orleans for Illinois in 2006. He writes that they returned to New Orleans whenever they could and from the words in his book, it is clear that his heart, at least, remains firmly in the city. He should be immensely proud of the vision of the city that he presents in Sugarcane Academy; it is not about what went wrong but about everything that is right in a community of people who care about each other. The lessons from this small school easily transcend borders and should be used to help children learn and flourish whenever they seem lost or afraid. In the wake of the August 2005 tragedy, something amazing was created by those who came through, something amazing that all of us can learn from.